A student who is ranked 3rd in my class got caught cheating earlier this year. It was a Calculus test and there was a sub that day. She went to class, answered the questions she knew, then walked out of the class with the test. She asked people she knew for answers, googled some, and did some work on her own. During lunch she came back to the class, where another period was taking the test, and acted like she was a student in that class. She turned her test in with the others in the class and would have gotten away clean had someone not reported her to administration.
Not like they did much anyway. I’m from NC, and she was nominated from my school for the Morehead-Cain scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill just a few days prior to getting caught. When she got caught, her nomination was not revoked and she was given just 1 day ISS that did not go on her permanent record.
This really upset me. It was a clear indication to me, a hard-working student that is slightly lower in the class, that administration does not want to discipline students that make them and the school look good. About 5 other students were caught doing the same thing she did, all of which were at the top of our class, and given similar “punishments”.
My overall opinion on the matter is this. If the person sitting next to me during a test is clearly stressed out and tries to sneak a peak or two at my paper, I’m not going to be the kid to cover it up and tell the teacher; but if you are creating complex plans to save your own butt because you were unprepared, I would not hesitate to give multiple days OSS to anyone, no matter how smart they are.
Boggles the mind. If they are smart enough to be valedictorian or close to that, why would they have any “need” to cheat, since the effort and risk involved in cheating is higher than that involved with honestly studying the material?
Of course, sometimes teachers can stealthily penalize cheaters. An example from middle school long ago was a teacher who gave a test with a section of true/false questions. The afternoon classes got a variant of the test where all of the true/false answers were reversed from the test given in the morning classes. Lunch time chatter led some students astray…
Cheating really gets to me because I was salutatorian of my high school class of over four hundred without cheating, and our valedictorian was infamous for cheating. At the mere mention of his name, people rolled their eyes and told me that they wished I was valedictorian because I had earned it and I don’t really have reason to believe that these people were making up rumors just for the heck of it. I would have loved to have turned him in but there was really nothing I could do because I never personally had a class with him.
Now, I really didn’t care all that much about the status of being valedictorian but because Texas will pay a valedictorian’s first year of tuition at a Texas public college, he essentially robbed me of over $9,000. Nine. Thousand. Dollars. I think $9,000 is important enough for someone to have sucked up their pride and turned him in, and for the school administration to have cared enough to give him some actual consequences, but unfortunately the attitude at my school seemed to be that exposing a cheater was somehow more offensive than being one.
This is why I cannot stand people with the attitude that they deserve to get away with pushing other people under the bus for their own benefit, nor the people who condone this because they don’t want to tarnish their own popularity.
@JustOneDad If you’re talking about my post, I’m sure you’re right about a lot of cases, but teachers in my science department still talk about him. Physics isn’t taken very seriously in my school because the teacher is completely clueless/doesn’t care about his students, so the head of the science department didn’t care enough to take matters into his own hands…I honestly think that at that point they were scared of essentially robbing him of his future at a good school. The same physics teacher was fired this year for allowing a student to cheat in a similar way…the difference is that the kid who was cheating was a B student, so the department wasn’t as concerned about ruining his chances at a big-name school by punishing him and the teacher that facilitated the cheating.
That’s another issue with cheating, often times the teacher really does not care if the students are cheating because it looks good to have good test scores. Today in an APUSH test, I was offered the answers for the test multiple times prior to taking the exam. The fact that the answers get around so fast is clearly an issue. Obviously, I didn’t use them or look at them. I earned an 82 without cheating while the cheating ring in my class all earned perfect scores. Does my teacher care? No. Even then, the amount of cheating that happens in my school can’t be blamed on just one student. The cheating is so widespread that if they were to punish every single person caught for cheating, there would be 10 students left in each grade.
High quality cheating is harder and requires more creativity than doing the work. It’s simpler just to study 15-20 min a day and be more time efficient.
Yes, but then they will be exposed on the actual AP test (when they get 1 scores after getting A grades in the class). Yes, cheating does happen on College Board tests, but it requires different methods, which are often more difficult and riskier than what you describe at your high school.
@ucbalumnus Lots of teachers don’t care about AP scores, though… For example every single person in my high school’s AP computer science course earned an A last year. The highest score on the AP test was a one. The highest score was a three. Our school’s teacher chalks it up to test anxiety when asked. Most kids who take the course either take it their senior year so that they get their decisions before they even take the test, or they say they didn’t take the exam/don’t self-report the score.
Since grades are a proxy for the desired characteristic (evidence of learning or ability to learn), it is no surprise that some will attempt to inflate the proxy measure (grades) if they believe doing that is easier than showing the desired characteristic (learning the material). For some, this means cheating (doing something that is prohibited). Others may try to game the system (doing something that is allowed, but probably not intended and probably not valuable in raising the desired characteristic).
The difference between cheating and gaming can be seen in standardized testing (e.g. SAT and ACT). Cheating is stealing tests and the like. Gaming is test-specific preparation.
I think stressed 13 will unfortunately see lots of the same behavior in college. I went to a college with an honor code and now that fraternities had filing cabinets full of tests from all of the courses their members had taken over the years so that when other members took those courses with those professors they could see the test and the answers. Even if all of the professors changed their exams each year (which they didn’t) they still had the advantage of seeing what information the professor was looking for and how they tended to structure their test questions. I know that the sharing behavior was happening too, someone would need to take the final early and then go back and tell others what the 5 essay questions were so they could prepare their answers. I’ve also heard about current students at other universities working in groups on take home exams and all getting perfect scores and the professors do not care, they don’t even look for signs of cheating. The best thing to do is to focus on yourself and be proud that your hard work resulted in a good grade and that you can look yourself in the mirror and know that it was your accomplishment, because cheating has been around in HS and college forever and will not go away.
Okay guys. For further clarifications, I don’t cheat. I was just stating that I don’t see the point in messing with people who cheat. Sorry for any confusions.
You need about a 40 degree drop to sustain a drop of 2 lbs PSI in a football. I think the equipment manager filled the balls with hot air just before they were measured while there was still a temperature gradient between the air in the locker room and the air in the football. They were then approved by Brady and then by the officials. No further tampering. All legal by the current rules.
There is definitely a difference between cheating on on quiz and cheating throughout the class. In my school, our #1 cheated throughout APUSH, he had all the answers and he would just memorize them. I guess someone had prove and handed in it in. To this day, nothing has been done to my knowledge and he seems to have cotton away with it
@udonsoup Completely agree, the thing is though, colleges care more about grades than understanding the core of the subjects. And I don’t condone cheating in any way, just to be clear.